I briefed Phyllis beforehand. I didn’t tell her about Markie’s hangup, of course, only that he was shy and liked a girl who wasn’t too outgoing. I hinted that he would not mind if she pretended to nod off for most of the evening.
She must have known I was talking about a nut, but it didn’t bother her. I had to snap my fingers under her nose to make sure she was awake.
I hadn’t told Markie I had fixed him up, so when he slumped into Augie’s and saw me at the bar with two chicks, he did a quick one-eighty. I tackled him and dragged him back.
Things went just fine. He no longer blushed and stuttered with chicks, he just acted bored. But he actually talked to Phyllis, who behaved like a perfect corpse. When she finished eating I began to worry that she had died, and Augie himself came over to ask if she was okay, but I guess she was only throwing her heart and soul into following my instructions.
“So what do you think?” I asked when our dates had gone to powder their noses, as my mother used to say, which is probably exactly what these two were doing.
“She’s great!” He spoke so eagerly, you would have thought he had found Phyllis toes-up in the Hudson. Then, his eyes darting like bats across a pale moon as he checked out the surrounding tables, he leaned forward and whispered, “You hold the other one’s attention when I push her in front of a cab.”
Christ, was I pissed! Here I am, thinking I have cured this maniac and won’t have to hear his disgusting stories anymore, and I haven’t made a scratch in his obsession. He was crazier than ever. I began to wonder if the cops were right about his aunts. And I shivered at the memory of a red-faced, nervous Markie, all alone in the house with their bodies. When she was alive, I would have thought twice about kicking his Aunt Angie out of bed.
I flashed on a way to cure him good, so I kept cool and said, “I got a better idea. You take off now and go to my place.” I gave him my spare keys. “Just stay in the bedroom until I bring her. You’d really like Phyllis better without a headlight up her ass, right?”
He slobbered so many thank-you’s inside of thirty seconds that I thought he was going to fall on his knees and kiss my ring, but I booted him out before the girls came back.
I told Sheryl that Markie had left because she had made him sick by farting all through the meal, and I said it loud enough for everybody to hear. She had a few words to say, too, and took a swing at me before she stormed out the door. This tickled Phyllis. Her bloodless lips flirted with the ghost of a stillborn smile. I took her to the bar for cognac, and she didn’t say no when I slipped her a couple of ’Ludes. I figured she had already dropped a few. Half an hour later, I nearly had to carry her to my Porsche.
She was zonked when we got home, but I held her head up and fed her another drink with six Tuinols in it. Then she had her corpse-impression down pat. It was so good that I had to hold a mirror to her mouth, in a moment of panic, to make sure I hadn’t overdone it.
I could have kicked myself when I stripped her down to her skin. She was too good for Markie. Her tits were as firm and springy as grapefruit. I had to go down on her before I would believe she wasn’t a virgin. Still doubtful, I threw her a quick fuck. Even out cold, she was the best I ever had, except that she gave lousy head. I resolved to give her the screwing she deserved when she woke up next morning.
Or, more likely, next Christmas.
I lugged her limp body into the bedroom and found Markie amusing himself with his Polaroids, which he carried with him for dull moments, but he dropped them and his jaw both when he saw her.
“Jeez, what a pal!” he shouted, choking up with gratitude. “I been wondering how I could ask you, you being in your line of work, to fix me up every now and then—”
“Don’t mention it, pal,” I said, dumping Phyllis and watching in fascination how she bounced on the bed, limp in every muscle. I was tempted to give her the mirror-test again. “Get it while it’s lukewarm.”
I took his pictures with me while I left him to it. In half an hour I would have the pleasure of telling him he had at last fucked a live girl. We could progressively reduce Phyllis’s dosage until she would twitch and flutter her eyelids when he screwed her. Or else I could just laugh at him. It was time he got the creeps for a change.
I had never looked too closely when Markie flashed his photo album. The pictures tended to give me nightmares, too. But tonight I looked, and I had to admit it was a spectacular collection, with not a missing head or ghastly wound or loathsome disease in the bunch. I wondered how he had managed to corner the market on prime pussy, recently deceased. Maybe he gave a discount to some girls’ boarding school with a very unsanitary kitchen. More likely he traded his snaps like baseball cards with other undertakers.
Looking at the pictures and thinking of tight little Phyllis gave me a hard-on that would not stay down. I decided not to save her for when she woke up. She would be worse then, groggy and bitchy and hung over. I went and peeked into the bedroom.
Not only had Markie finished, he had found my camera and was adding her to his portfolio. He had her propped up on her knees with her ass in the air, looking as good as the Taj Mahal and its twin sister. I have never been fastidious about buttered buns, so I pulled down my pants and climbed aboard.
As I slipped inside, I said, “You lost your cherry, Markie. This is a live one.”
“Yeah, she moaned a little when I started.” I could have murdered him, the casual way he said that. All the trouble I’d gone to, and it didn’t bother him at all! He added, “I didn’t know how to tell you that you screwed up, you being a pro, so I held a pillow on her face. She’s just fine, now.”
Funny: I didn’t scream, or throw up, or break into a cold sweat. I don’t think I even skipped a beat as I reflected on this news. Phyllis felt as good as ever, and she was never going to give me a load of crap about smoking or drinking or chasing other broads. She would never bitch at me for leaving the toilet seat up. On those days when I was letting my feelings sleep in, I wouldn’t have to open up and share them with her.
As Markie had somehow known all along, she was my kind of woman.
* * * *
Despite Markie’s best professional efforts, Phyllis got kind of messy after a week or two, so we kissed her bon voyage on Pier Eighty-six. Later we were hanging out near Sardi’s when we saw this showgirl type ankling toward Broadway.
“I hope she has a heart attack,” Markie says.
“You know,” says I, giving it some thought before I start drifting after her, “she doesn’t look all that healthy, does she?”
CHILD OF THE NIGHT
Franz was no more than six years old when some impulse that he later took as proof of precocious genius prompted him to open a nursery window to better gaze upon the glory of the full moon, to better feel the touch of the far-wandering night breeze, to better hear the liquid fluting and trilling of the nightingale.
The night! It held beauty and mystery and a promise of adventure. The day was crude and plain, it made no promises at all, only threats of study and drudgery and duty. Why were all those stupid grownups sleeping? Why weren’t they wandering in the silvered fields, which surely no longer rippled with humdrum barley, but with angelic grain that would impart all knowledge and eternal pleasure? Why weren’t they out gazing in stunned wonder at the moon? Why weren’t they running barefoot through the woods, pursuing fireflies whose flashing message, if decoded, might make one God?
With thoughts like these (as he later reconstructed them in adolescent verse) tumbling through his brain, he fell asleep over the windowsill. There his nurse discovered him the next morning, more out of the window than in it, his nightshirt soaked with dew and his flesh pimpled by mosquitoes.
Gretchen beat him, an almost unprecedented event, and she did it in a tearful hysteria that terrified him far more than the pain inflicted by her big, red palm. When his mother dashed from bed to investigate the commotion, she raised his terror to a new level of shrieks, convulsions and shameful incontinence. I
nstead of protesting the nurse’s brutality, she grabbed a handful of his long, yellow curls and jerked his head from side to side as she screamed in his face that he was either an idiot or a demon, who had been switched for the real Franz in infancy to wreak destruction upon their ancient house.
His father, the count, came roaring like a bear from its den to sort things out with words that Franz had never heard before. The nearly-demolished boy was left alone for some hours to—as his mother put it—think upon his sin. In fact he thought upon the exasperating wilfulness and stupidity of adults, and vowed that he would never become one. He believed he at last understood why his Aunt Magda had celebrated her thirteenth birthday by drinking lye.
Consoling him later with kisses and chocolates and promises of a trip to the zoological gardens in Vienna, his mother told him that no proper Christian slept with his windows open.
“Did Jesus’ house have windows?” asked Franz, who was often distracted by lines of inquiry that others found irrelevant, if not downright queer.
“Of course he did!” His mother seemed bemused by an equal irrelevancy, the painful mosquito bites he had suffered, but only by those on his throat. “The question flirts with blasphemy, young man. Our Blessed Lord was a carpenter, Franz, and his house must have had the sturdiest windows with the strongest fastenings that could be fashioned by professional skill combined with divine powers. You don’t suppose Our Savior would have run the risk of being bitten by a vampire!”
“What’s a vampire?” he asked, and his flustered mother told him that she had spoken no such word, that in fact no such word existed, and that, unless he immediately recanted his error, his hearing would be corrected with a triple dose of Dr. Hapfstengel’s Universal Purgative.
“What’s a vampire?” he later asked his father, who was far more reasonable, but whose statements could be irksomely oracular.
“Vampires, like virgins or priests, are things that women believe in. We must never fail to humor them in such matters.”
* * * *
Later, by ingratiating himself with crones and lackeys and woodcutters; by paying closer heed than most did to the muttering of Grudin, the village idiot; and by devouring sensational novels that he had to conceal from his mother, Franz learned all there was to know about vampires, except the most important fact of all: Where to find one?
Of course he understood that the undead haunted graveyards and wastelands and ruins, but in a countryside that had been disputed for millennia by nearly anyone who could read a map and raise an army, such likely locations left scant room for the fields and villages of honest folk. He took to haunting the accursed spots himself until, his surprise not unmingled with a certain satisfaction, he noticed that the peasants had taken to crossing themselves or making less orthodox signs at the sight of his gaunt, pale figure.
It was true that he slept by day and prowled by night, and that he scorned the daylight world of commerce and industry, of sport and fellowship. He secretly longed to become a vampire, to indulge fully his passion for night and solitude, to command strange powers and live forever. Could it be that one of those bites he had suffered in childhood had not been made by a mosquito at all? Could it be—but except in certain of his darker verses, he was forced to reject this speculation. He had no thirst whatever for blood. To the extreme displeasure of his father, who counted no day complete without killing some bird or animal, the sight of blood, sometimes even the mere mention of it, made Franz vomit.
At the university, he discovered that vampirism was held to be a quaint fantasy of untutored rustics. Having mentioned his obsessive interest to the wrong people, he was ever after pictured by his peers as a forelock-tugging bumpkin who wore lederhosen and practiced clog-dancing in his room.
In the depths of the library, however, he came upon forgotten books in ancient tongues that advanced a far different view. In the popular press, too, vampires were not taken lightly, and he collected enough clippings in his student days to overflow five massive scrapbooks. Straining his allowance, he would often take trains to Prague, Munich or Bucharest, pursuing further complications of trains and coaches and footpaths to investigate personally the more horrific hints. With infuriating similarity, the supposed eyewitnesses told him that the events he tried to verify, although indisputably true, had happened to someone else, somewhere else, at some other time.
The only good that came of this was that his father assumed he was squandering his time and substance on gentlemanly vices. He increased Franz’s allowance and grew more benign.
Although no one else did, Franz considered himself a poet. Meanwhile, almost by accident, he established himself as an expert (by academic standards, a hopelessly unsound one) on folklore, and as a journalist whose articles earned favor on the most sensational frontiers of the press. This proved a godsend when the renewal of an obscure quarrel among the factions that claimed his homeland made it impossible for him to make a living, as his now-deceased father had done, merely by being a count.
* * * *
Franz was astounded when the dusty little priest who happened to share his table at the inn proved to hold provocative opinions on the subject of his own obsession.
“They are not fools, you know,” Father Teodor said. “How could any fool survive for a thousand years, two thousand?”
“But they must eat.” Franz remembered and addressed the pork and cabbage on his plate, which only a long and tiresome journey could have made palatable.
“Of course they must.” The priest lived in this remote outpost on just the other side of the known universe, and perhaps since he had suffered no such journey, his plate remained untouched. “But it is absurd to imagine that they flap brazenly through the world like Mr. Stoker’s creature, seizing, as the whim strikes them, virgins or real-estate salesman.”
“How, then?”
“Protective coloration would be essential. The vampire can no longer be a wicked nobleman in a shunned castle, for who would shun it in this day and age? Journalists like yourself would descend upon it like a flight of ... ah ... vampires, if you will, and take it apart stone by stone in search of the hidden crypt.”
“Drinking blood would surely attract some notice,” Franz said, “no matter what his disguise.”
“Would it draw notice on a battlefield, where one might be free to wander among the wounded, to kneel beside them, lean close to them? Who bothers to measure all the spilled blood of our fallen heroes? Imagine the modern vampire as a military physician, a stretcher-bearer, a looter.”
“Or a priest,” Franz said, for he was annoyed to hear his romantic fantasy translated into pedestrian terms.
“Exactly, my son!” cried Father Teodor, not at all put out. “The normal course of my duties requires me to drink blood in full public view, and no one has ever once suggested driving a stake through my heart.”
Although not at all devout, Franz was scandalized to hear a man of the cloth flirt with blasphemy. The priest laughed as if to prove he was joking; and, as if to advance further proof, touched the oddly-patterned crucifix at his breast.
“However, your local vampire has ignored all this good advice,” Franz said, gesturing at the low-ceilinged room around them. Except for the innkeeper drowsing in a corner, it was empty. The windows were tightly shuttered and hung with garlic-blossoms. Arriving late at night on a lame horse, he had pounded on the door of the inn for nearly an hour before gaining admittance, and only then after demonstrating his ability to recite The Lord’s Prayer without error or hesitation, a feat that had taken three tries. “He has not, obviously, escaped notice.”
“What has been noticed is the absence of several young persons, who no doubt grew bored with village life and ran off to sample the cosmopolitan dazzlements of beggary and prostitution. Since we cannot blame the stupefying dullness of their parents for driving them away, we must search for miracles, wonders, vampires.”
“But the bodies?”
“A girl who died from refusing to eat,
a boy bleached white when he was recovered from the stream where the paper-mill dumps its bleach. And you mustn’t forget the drunkard who glimpsed a wolf in the graveyard, or the spinster who heard a man whispering obscenities at her window.” For the first time the priest fixed him directly with his eyes. They were surprisingly deep and knowing, and they belied his rather frivolous manner and his dusty, inconsequential appearance. “No, Franz, you’ve come to the wrong place entirely to fulfill your lifelong ambition.”
“My—?” He found himself blushing as he had not done since he was a young man, and that was a long time ago.
“I’ve read some of your verses. Not entirely unlike Baudelaire, I thought. But consider, my son: If the well-disguised vampire I have described lurks in the modern world, why would he endanger his long career by taking on an apprentice whose notions have been fuddled by Gothic fiction?”
Franz only answer seemed as lame to him as the Ontological Proof of God’s existence: If I want it to be so, it must be so. He refrained from speaking this aloud.
“Some would find your preoccupation unhealthy, or even sinful, but I submit that it reflects a deep longing for spiritual transcendence. If you want mystery and awe and eternal life, you really should give the Church a try.”
Franz smiled sourly. For a priest in such an obscure parish, he was remarkably skillful at fitting his sales-talk to the potential customer. He had been stringing Franz along with his prattle about vampires.
Ignoring the suggestion, Franz said, “What about the local suspect, this Valdemar Trusis?”
Nasty Stories Page 10
